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Obamacare ... unintended consequence?

Illegals are not covered by Obamacare ... but those 11 million are mostly uninsured; especially the poorest of them. Obamacare cuts the funding, by half, that helped doctors and hospital give these people health care ... who will make up the shortfall?

Interestingly even the NY Times is willing to print a statement that the cowardice of the politicians in addressing immigration law simultaneously with health care reform could essentially impair the health care available to those who now will have insurance ... the insured will have less access to the health care that the insurance would pay for?

No matter where they are, all hospitals are obliged under federal law to treat anyone who arrives at the emergency room, regardless of their immigration status.

The hospitals range from prominent public ones, like Bellevue Hospital Center in Manhattan, to neighborhood mainstays like Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn and Scripps Mercy Hospital in San Diego. They include small rural outposts like Othello Community Hospital in Washington State, which receives a steady flow of farmworkers who live in the country illegally.

However, those hospitals that are situated in certain areas bear the brunt of the burden with poor illegal immigrants.

Lutheran Medical Center is in the Sunset Park neighborhood, where low-wage earning Chinese and Latino communities converge near an expressway. Hospitals are not allowed to record patients’ immigration status, but Ms. Goldstein estimated that 20 percent of its patients were what she called “the undocumented — not only uninsured, but uninsurable.”

She said Congressional staff members acknowledged that the health care law would scale back the money that helps pay for emergency care for such patients, but were reluctant to tackle the issue.
“I was told in Washington that they understand that this is a problem, but immigration is just too hot to touch,” she said.

The Affordable Care Act sets up state exchanges to reduce the cost of commercial health insurance, but people must prove citizenship or legal immigration status to take part. They must show similar documentation to apply for Medicaid benefits that are expanded under the law.

The act did call for increasing a little-known national network of 1,200 community health centers that provide primary care to the needy, regardless of their immigration status. But that plan, which could potentially steer more of the uninsured away from costly hospital care, was curtailed by Congressional budget cuts last year.

That leaves hospitals like Lutheran, which is nonprofit and has run a string of such primary care centers for 40 years, facing cuts at both ends.

On a recent weekday in Lutheran’s emergency room, a Chinese mother of two stared sadly through the porthole of an isolation unit. The woman had active tuberculosis and needed surgery to drain fluid from one lung, said Josh Liu, a patient liaison.

The disease had been discovered during a checkup at one of Lutheran’s primary care centers, where the sliding scale fee starts at $15. But the woman, an illegal immigrant, had no way to pay for the surgery.

In some states, including New York, hospitals caring for illegal immigrants in life-threatening situations can seek payment case by case, from a program known as emergency Medicaid. But the program has many restrictions and will not make up for the cuts in the $20 billion pool, hospital executives said.

Groups that favor more restrictive immigration policies said they agreed that the cuts in the $20 billion fund were a burden. They said hospitals obviously had a duty to provide emergency care for everybody, including illegal immigrants.

“I kind of like living in a society where we don’t let people die on the steps of the emergency room,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of one such group, the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

But he said the answer lay in enforcing laws, so that illegal immigrants leave the country, not in extending health coverage.

“There is no ideal resolution to the problem, other than reducing the illegal population,” he said. “Incorporating illegal immigrants into health exchanges or directly taxpayer-funded health care legitimizes their presence.”

The Obama administration said the Affordable Care Act supported safety-net hospitals in other ways, pointing to measures that raise payments for primary care and give bonuses for improvements in quality.

“We are taking important steps to make health care more affordable and accessible for millions of Americans,” Erin Shields Britt, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said in an e-mail. “Health reform isn’t the place to fix our broken immigration system.”

The corporation runs New York City’s public hospitals, which treated 480,000 uninsured patients last year, an estimated 40 percent of them illegal immigrants. The same worries haunt tiny Othello Community Hospital, in Washington state’s rural Adams County, where it is the only hospital for miles around.

Last year, the state began requiring that participants in a basic health plan prove that they are citizens or legal residents.

As a consequence, 4,000 out of the 4,400 patients at the nearby primary care center, mostly immigrant farmworkers, lost their coverage, leaving Othello more financially vulnerable when those people need emergency care.

In Central California, Harry Foster, director of the Family HealthCare Network, another primary care center, called the Affordable Care Act “a double-edged sword.”

Many low-wage earning citizens now lack employer-sponsored health insurance, and the health care industry is already competing for those who will gain coverage through the law. But no one is competing to treat those it leaves out, he said.

“We will receive more and more of those patients,” he said, estimating that 40 percent of the area’s residents were illegal immigrant farmworkers. “But financially, we can’t take on all the uninsured patients in the area, to the exclusion of all the others, and survive.”

In many ways Lutheran, a century-old hospital that refurbished a defunct factory to serve as its hub in the 1960s, has been a prototype of the law’s new model: coordinating primary and preventive care to improve health outcomes while curbing costs. Yet it stands to lose $25 million from the cuts.

“This is an unintended consequence of the law,” said Ms. Goldstein, the hospital’s chief executive. “But so far, nobody is doing anything to resolve it.”

If the people who wrote the bill had asked the grass-roots providers for input, they might have noticed this glitch. If enough of the polliticians had truly read the bill carefully, in the context of the real world, they might have noticed this glitch?

I'm surprised Holder lets WA ask for proof of citizenship to join a health plan. Seems out of character for him.

So, by 2014, 2016, etc. we will finally find out what is really in this law. In that regard, Nancy Pelosi was correct, I guess.

G.Clinchy@gmail.com"Know in your heart that all things are possible. We couldn't conceive of a miracle if none ever happened." -Libby Fudim

​I don't use the PM feature, so just email me direct at the address shown above.

So what is it? Sounds like the Affordable Healthcare does not provide healthcare to illegals, but you are bashing it for not.

I thought caring for illegals was at the heart of your issues

Once again, an incredibly foolish comment void of any substance and vapid as it relates to the OP..

Of course illegals will be treated.
And my premise as using this as an excuse to make them "VOTING" citizens is relevant and valid.
This is just another, in a series of efforts, to create a dependant electorate (gladly suckling on the nipple of Govt.) guided to install a permanent ruling class by the secular progressives.
A blind man can see this..............

So why is it any different if they have to treat them when they show up already....I think that has been the rule for a long time. If the lazy a>>es americans woould go to work there would be less illegals in your rual area taking up hospital beds.

I'm a step or two ahead...you just found some rheteric to bash the health plan (obama and the democrats). Oh yea, don't forget this is really Romneycare, too!

So why is it any different if they have to treat them when they show up already....I think that has been the rule for a long time. If the lazy a>>es americans woould go to work there would be less illegals in your rual area taking up hospital beds.

I'm a step or two ahead...you just found some rheteric to bash the health plan (obama and the democrats). Oh yea, don't forget this is really Romneycare, too!

what is more offensive, an American on welfare ,medicaid and food stamps or an illegal immigrant and his or her family trying to work their way to respectability but lacking health care insurance?

Is there a real difference?

Illegals take a beating on this forum. I don't like them coming here undocumented either. But i don't think they deserve the level of contempt they get here. They are less than 1% of the population of this country. There is no way they have the ability to change our socio-economic landscape at this time on the scale some folks on here suggest is possible. What needs to happen is that there are severe penalties for hiring them. If there's no work, they won't be as quick to come here.

Our borders are HUGE! Sealing them completely is not an option. We have to remove the incentive to come here illegally to turn this around. Perhaps the fact that they won't be covered for health expenses by law is a good thing?-Paul

I don't understand why people are still so upset about a program that is yet to be. Come Nov. Romney will be elected, sworn-in in Jan. Control of the Senate will reverse and all chaos will disappear and the natural order restored. ...Right?

JD

One cannot reason someone out of something they were not reasoned into. - Jonathan Swift

So why is it any different if they have to treat them when they show up already....I think that has been the rule for a long time. If the lazy a>>es americans woould go to work there would be less illegals in your rual area taking up hospital beds.

I'm a step or two ahead...you just found some rheteric to bash the health plan (obama and the democrats). Oh yea, don't forget this is really Romneycare, too!

The Federal govt was giving them aid to help treat these illegals; now that aid will be cut in half in a few years. I think you did not read the part about the hospitals not being viable without the Fed aid.

Those Fed funds are being moved to Obamacare, ostensibly to treat poor citizens who will now be insured. What good will that health insurance be if there is no hospital left to give the care?

I would agree that no one who is seriously ill should be turned away. I can't imagine any doctor doing so. How to fund all of this is the problem. While Fed funding of health care for illegals may not be a Fed responsibility ... enforcing immigration laws is its responsibility. So by fulfilling their constitutional responsibility ... they would solve the other problem as well.

G.Clinchy@gmail.com"Know in your heart that all things are possible. We couldn't conceive of a miracle if none ever happened." -Libby Fudim

​I don't use the PM feature, so just email me direct at the address shown above.